Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Greater New Orleans

Change Region

comments

Freshwater exposure likely killed dolphin that made Slidell area waterways its post-Katrina home

slidell dolpin

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said Tuesday (June 17, 2014) that a necropsy is planned for a dead dolphin found in a waterway in the Lakeshore Estates neighborhood near Slidell. She said scientists are certain it's the same dolphin that first turned up in the area around the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and soon became a popular attraction. This photo was taken in 2012.
(NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune archive)

A dolphin found dead in a Slidell area waterway over the weekend likely died of freshwater exposure, a marine biologist said Tuesday (June 17). The male bottle-nosed dolphin had become a popular attraction in the waterways of Lakeshore Estates in recent years.

Ashley Roth, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, said a homeowner alerted authorities to the dead dolphin Sunday. She said the dolphin's carcass was retrieved Monday and sent to the Audubon Nature Institute for the necropsy.

The dolphin had numerous lesions on its body and while the necropsy did not definitively determine a cause of death, the lesions were caused by exposure to freshwater, which no doubt contributed to the animal's demise, said Stacey Horstman, a marine biologist in the St. Petersburg, Fla., office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Horstman said salinity levels have plummeted in the waterways in which the dolphin lived, likely due to excessive rain in recent weeks.

Roth and Horstman said scientists are certain the dolphin found dead Sunday is the same one that had been in the area for a number of years. The dolphin turned up in the waterways around Lakeshore Estates around the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Marine experts said the dolphin likely followed his parents into the waterways for safety during the hurricane and stayed there after his parents swam away.

"He made it his home,'' Horstman said.

Homeowners in the area had reported not seeing the dolphin in recent days, and Horstman said scientists hoped that indicated that it had swam away, perhaps to saltier waters.

But that was not the case.

In recent years the dolphin had become an attraction as it followed alongside boats and allowed some swimmers to interact with it. Signs along the canals asked people not to feed or interact with the dolphin but they were often ignored. On several occasions, the dolphin became aggressive, biting some swimmers and boaters.